Frequently asked questions about FeedDemon, the leading RSS feed reader for Windows.

Sorry, there isn't a discount on the latest version of FeedDemon for those who purchased FeedDemon v2 but skipped FeedDemon v3.

While we do try to be generous with our upgrade pricing, it's not possible for us to offer discounts when upgrading from versions that were released so long ago. FeedDemon v2 was released in 2006, and it was a free upgrade for those who purchased the first version of FeedDemon, which was released in 2003.

FeedDemon stores its data using SQLite, which is regarded as being very reliable even in situations that would cause other programs to corrupt their data (such as a sudden power failure). However, in very rare cases FeedDemon's database may become corrupt.

It should be noted that the most likely cause of corruption is a problem with your hard drive, so it's recommended that you check your hard drive for errors before continuing. If serious errors exist on your hard drive, FeedDemon may not be able to repair the database.

To repair the database, first open FeedDemon's cache folder, which contains your feed data. If you haven't changed the location of the cache folder, you can find it by opening Windows Explorer and typing this into the address bar:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\FeedDemon\v1

Next, download this ZIP file, then extract it (unzip it) into your cache folder. Make sure FeedDemon isn't running, then double-click the file named FDBREPAIR.BAT to start the repair process (which may take a few minutes to complete).

If the repair is successful, the next time you start FeedDemon it will detect that the database has been repaired and double-check it for errors.

Note: A simple precaution against corruption is to make a backup of FeedDemon's cache folder at regular intervals. You can do this by copying the folder in Windows Explorer, or by selecting File > Manage Cache > Backup in FeedDemon.

FeedDemon's install program is around 4MB, and a full install requires about 13MB on your hard drive. Extra space is also required for FeedDemon's database/cache, which is typically less than 50MB but may be larger depending on the amount of feeds you read.

A minimum of 1GB of RAM is recommended, but more RAM will be helpful if you subscribe to a lot of feeds or keep several pages open in FeedDemon's tabbed browser.

Note: If you have an older computer with 1GB of RAM or less, this FAQ entry provides some tips on optimizing FeedDemon to run smoothly on it.

The ability to delete individual articles was removed in FeedDemon 4.0. We're sorry to have to make this change, but the majority of FeedDemon customers use synchronization with Google Reader, and the fact that Google Reader doesn't support deleting articles made it impossible to reliably support it in FeedDemon.

If you purchase a serial number for FeedDemon, that serial number will continue to work for all minor updates, but there will be an upgrade cost for the next major version.

For example, if you purchased a serial number for FeedDemon 3, that serial number worked in all 3.x versions, but it no longer worked in FeedDemon 4. Although FeedDemon 4 isn't a free upgrade, the cost of upgrading is very reasonable.

The way FeedDemon works is that it only does a "full" sync - which includes changes to read/unread items, starred items, tags and shared items - at startup and then once an hour. In between it does "incremental" sync, which primarily checks for read/unread changes since the last sync.

This makes FeedDemon's synching very efficient, at the cost of not immediately showing changes made outside of that copy of FeedDemon. For example, if you star an item in Google Reader (or another application that syncs with Google Reader) while FeedDemon is running, that star may not show up in FeedDemon right away. But it will show up during the next full sync.

If you want changes made outside of FeedDemon to show up right away, you can force a full sync by clicking the "Update All" icon above FeedDemon's subscription list, or by pressing Shift+Ctrl+F5.

Note: Regardless of whether an incremental or full sync is performed, items you mark read, star or tag in FeedDemon are synched with Google Reader every few minutes.

If FeedDemon says it's unable to connect to the Internet or it's unable to make a secure connection to Google Reader, then chances are your firewall is blocking it. This happens most frequently after upgrading to a new version of FeedDemon - your firewall may have permitted the previous version to connect, but it doesn't recognize the new version and blocks it without telling you.

This can be resolved by removing FeedDemon from your firewall's list of approved applications. The next time you run FeedDemon, the firewall should ask you whether to allow it to connect.

If you're not sure how to do this, stop by our support group and let us know which firewall software you're using (popular choices include Windows Firewall, Norton Internet Security, ZoneAlarm and McAfee Personal Firewall) and we'll do our best to step you through it.

Update: Twitter has announced that they're discontinuing support for RSS feeds. For the moment Twitter feeds will continue to work in FeedDemon, but at some point they'll simply stop working. For this reason, it's recommended that you not subscribe to Twitter feeds.

FeedDemon includes a number of enhancements which improve your Twitter feeds. If you're not sure how to find these feeds, simply login to Twitter and look for the orange RSS icon at the bottom right of any page.

There are separate feeds available for your tweets, you and your friends tweets, and the tweets of any single person you follow. Just browse around Twitter to locate the one you want to subscribe to, then copy and paste the URL into FeedDemon.

Note that some Twitter feeds are password-protected, so FeedDemon may ask for your Twitter login before you can subscribe to these feeds.

Important: Password-protected Twitter feeds are supported only in the Pro version of FeedDemon, and must be added to a folder that is not synched with Google Reader (here's why).

Status Updates - this is probably the most important feed, but Facebook doesn't advertise that it's available. To find it, locate the URL of your posts feed as described above, then change the URL by replacing share_friends_posts with friends_status.

Once you've found the URL of the feed, simply click FeedDemon's "Subscribe" button to add it to your subscriptions.

We take great pride in making FeedDemon run very fast (after all, its name is a play on the phrase "speed demon"). But as is the case with all software, it may not be so speedy on a slower computer. Luckily, there are ways to speed it up:

Reduce FeedDemon's memory requirements by decreasing the number of articles that it keeps in your feeds. To do this, right click "Subscriptions" in the subscription tree, then select "Folder Properties" and switch to the Updating tab. Next, change the archiving value (50 items is recommended for low-memory systems), then click OK and choose "Apply to ALL feeds in ALL folders."

Avoid opening a ton of browser tabs in FeedDemon when using a slower computer. Today's multimedia- and script-heavy web pages can seriously tax an older system, so opening a dozen web pages in separate browser tabs can slow things to a crawl.

Use Google Reader synchronization. Feeds that aren't synched with Google Reader must be downloaded one-at-a-time to discover new articles, but when your feeds are synched FeedDemon can download all your new articles in a single request.

Turn off "Enable page transitions" on the Appearance page of FeedDemon's options (F8).

Following these simple guidelines has enabled us to keep FeedDemon running very smoothly on an old laptop that can't handle most of today's software.

If you've lost your FeedDemon serial number, just stop by eSellerate's After-Purchase Services page and submit a request for your order history. You'll then be sent an email containing your FeedDemon order information, which includes your serial number.

Note: eSellerate is our e-commerce provider, so this is the same company you purchased FeedDemon through.

"Clippings" were tied to NewsGator, so they unfortunately had to be deprecated when NewsGator discontinued their feed platform.

Upgrading to the latest version of FeedDemon won't remove your clippings if they exist on that computer, but they will only be available on that computer (ie: they won't be synched). So if you install FeedDemon on a different computer, then your clippings won't be available. There are, however, two ways to get them back:

On the older computer, right-click on your clippings and select "Export Clippings" to create an RSS feed of your clippings. Copy this RSS file to your new computer, then click FeedDemon's "Subscribe" button and type the full path of the file as the feed's URL. This works because FeedDemon enables you to subscribe to feeds that exist on your hard drive (just makes sure to add the feed to a folder that's not synched with Google Reader, since Google won't be able to access it).

On the older computer, select File > Manage Cache and click the "Explore" button to navigate to FeedDemon's cache folder. Copy the "NewsBins" subfolder from there to the cache folder on your new computer. FeedDemon will see the contents of this folder and show your clippings just as it did on your older computer.

If you're synching FeedDemon with Google Reader, simply install FeedDemon on your new computer and give it your Google login. FeedDemon will then show the same feeds, starred items, tags and shared items that were on your old computer.

If you're not synching with Google Reader, copy FeedDemon's cache folder (File > Manage Cache) from the original computer to your new system, then make sure that FeedDemon on your new system is pointing to the correct cache folder.

This is almost always due to a problem with the feed itself, and more often than not it's because the feed's publisher is incorrectly changing the publication date of existing items, making RSS readers like FeedDemon think they're new items.

Speaking more technically, when an RSS reader downloads a feed, it has to figure out which items in that feed it already knows about and which ones are new. Many feeds uniquely identify each item, so usually this isn't a big deal. But some feeds don't uniquely identify items, so it's up to the software to figure out how to uniquely ID each item.

An item's publication date is part of this unique ID, so if a feed changes the publication date of existing items, you'll end up seeing duplication of those items in your RSS reader.

By default, FeedDemon won't prefetch anything older than 10 days, and it won't prefetch more than 500 articles. These defaults can be changed by clicking the "Prefetch" button in FeedDemon's options.

Prefetch relies on Internet Explorer's browser cache for storage. If you've configured IE so that it uses very little disk space for its temporary Internet files, then there may not be enough space to store everything that needs to be prefetched.

Related to the above, if you've told IE to delete its browser history on exit, then prefetched items will also be deleted.

Articles in secure (https:) feeds are not prefetched

Some feeds can't be prefetched because their servers don't allow it (for example, they don't permit caching of their content).

FeedDemon only retrieves the text content of pages it prefetches - it won't download images, links, styles, etc., in linked pages. This often means that the pages don't look as you'd expect them to, but their text is still available for reading offline.

Prefetching refers to downloading links and images in unread articles so that they're available when working offline. This powerful feature enables you to view the images and external web sites linked in your unread items even without an Internet connection.

Simply select File > Prefetch Items for Offline Reading to start prefetching your unread (and, optionally, starred) articles. Prefetching may take a few minutes if you have a lot of unread items, but it works in the background so you can continue using FeedDemon.

When you're working offline, links which haven't been prefetched have a red underline to let you know they're not available. Clicking a link that has been prefetched shows the offline copy of the linked page.

The Content Filters in FeedDemon Pro are designed to hide the stuff you don't care about. Instead of seeing every single article in every single feed, you can have a content filter which automatically hides articles that don't interest you.

For example, suppose you're subscribed to several high-traffic tech feeds which talk about a lot different things, but you only care to see articles about Google, Apple or Microsoft. Simply create a content filter which has Google, Apple and Microsoft as the keywords, then choose the option to mark articles as read if they do NOT contain any of these keywords.

Next, save the filter, then choose Tools > Manage Content Filters and assign your new filter to those tech feeds. From now on, articles in those feeds which don't mention Google, Apple or Microsoft will be marked as read before you see them, hiding them from view.

Note that to avoid confusion, a feed can have only one content filter. It's not possible to assign multiple content filters to the same feed.

Tip: If you subscribe to a feed which has several different authors, you can use a content filter to show or hide articles from specific authors.

FeedDemon isn't deleting them - it's simply marking them as read. By default, read items don't appear in FeedDemon's newspaper, so they're hidden from view. If you wish to view them again, just select a different newspaper filter from the dropdown above the browser (shown below).

As much as we'd like to offer a choice of embedded browsers, unfortunately this isn't practical. While Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome are all great browsers, they can't be embedded in external applications the way that IE can.

This post in the FeedDemon developer's blog has more details on the subject.